In the American Idiom

...We who do not deserve to live live constantly...

...Miss Oates makes statements of fact and truth as she sees them, without drama or sentimentality...

...Her concerns are the eternal ones afflicting men and women, parents and children...

...She alternates descriptions of hopeless women drinking and playing cards in an expensive club...

...In an era lorded over by the art of the absurd, by Dada language and Dada thought, by the fashion for hallucinatory prose and poetry (not to mention drugs), by poetry exploded beyond meaning and even beyond sound, Miss Oates does something very unique: She writes basic American English of what to the contemporary jaded eye and ear seems almost dazzling purity...

...with snatches of their most prosaic conversation...

...A clue to what she may one day want to explore lies, perhaps, in the strangeness of "Dead Actors," a poem that gives a television viewer's reactions while watching dead actors come fearfully alive in old movies: We are the ugly, unfllmed, who do not deserve to live...

...There is nothing of erasures in me or sharp corners, no rewinding, a saint's stare burned blind by wind a life yawned away in flesh...

...Yet in Miss Oates' case the comparison is appropriate, for whether poet or novelist, she inhabits the same interior world...

...And in "Foetal Song," Miss Oates does, in fact, achieve a truly intense poetic distillation: Her heart breathes quiet and I drink blood...

...It has a grainy white taste, a little salty...

...Not more poems-but higher aspirations, deeper searching...

...With searing frankness she reveals "A Woman in Her Secret Life": There is nothing of men in me except the strange raw texture of their love...

...He wants Miss Oates to talk about a greater number of things, to move out beyond what she now knows and apply her fine mind and language to the unknown and the uncontained...

...But her verses are not the confessional or couch poetry sometimes associated with women poets...

...The strength of her poetry-and prose, too-lies in her use of language...

...The reader wants more than he is given...

...Not that Anonymous Sins is a perfect book...

...And even though I am not so sure as the editor who wrote the dust-jacket copy for Anonymous Sins what a "prose poem" is (the editor is positive that this is what Miss Oates writes), I do feel she has not decided to leave prose entirely behind in this collection...

...Oxygen from her tremendous lungs tastes white too but airy bubbly, it makes me dizzy . . . .' Clearly, Miss Oates is no more easily classifiable as a poet than as a novelist...

...I had the baby, that's Perry at Yale...

...Tell us what Have those other lovers done...

...Flies in sunlight Have buzzed for other lovers here...

...These women have no language and so they chatter In the rhythm of stereotype that is won After certain years and certain money...

...the awesome horrors and beauty of life and death...

...On the surface this may seem a rather obvious statement, one that could be made about almost any kind of book-but the nature of Miss Oates' work and the literary time in which we live give special meaning to the overworked phrase...

...This admirable eccentricity has already led some reviewers to probe and poke at her most recent novel, Them, as if it were a prehistoric monster defrosted from a block of ice...

...I am juicy and sweet and coiled...

...While he speaks to her I suck marrow from her bones...

...In the first part of the poem "Five Confessions," however, there is what might best be described as the memory of prose (recalling, perhaps, scenes from Them): I watch the nondescript window from This nondescript bed...

...Because her poetry is not written in or as another voice, a means of expression distinct from her fiction, her sensibilities and themes remain unchanged...

...Dead actors gloat upon us like magicians they flash gestures of life: we stare...

...Their clarity is produced through the discipline and sensitivity of her language, not through reliance, as it were, on accepted devices of a particular school of poetry...

...For at 31 she has become an established figure in a literary environment that still crowns the novelist king (or queen), the only "real" writer of "real" books...

...Hers is the language of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell at his best, and William Carlos Williams...

...Reviewed by JOHN RATTI Author, "A Remembered Darkness" It is inevitable that Joyce Carol Oates' first volume of poetry, Anonymous Sins & Other Poems, will be considered, weighed and evaluated in relation to her considerable achievements as a novelist...

...Even our shrieks of terror are amateur work, unfilmed...

...And I am quite certain that many critics will be as thoroughly bewildered by the stylistic similarity-and the forthright mind behind it-In Anonymous Sins...

...Most of the poems in this collection are cohesive in sound, meaningful in thought...

...And in the title poem the very blunt-ness is no less effective a vehicle for her elemental vision: I understand how a woman is used used up how a man moves too abrupt at any pace...

...conversation that is devastating because of its lack of beauty or grace, and its inherent sense of great pain unrelieved by the catharsis of tragedy: Then Michael was born, and then I got pregnant again and we were afraid to write home...

...I expect, though, that Miss Oates will reach in this direction only when and if she determines to find her own particular commitment as a poet...

...He's going to Italy this summer...

...Or perhaps they once rose naked from the sea And the stereotype rose from them, like a snapshot Snapped by envious fingers, an act of love They never noticed...

...between his family and mine what choice did we have...

...Although one has no way of knowing whether or not Miss Oates considers herself a "prose poet," there is little doubt that in a piece like "Lines for Those to Whom Tragedy Is Denied," she straddles the fence between prose and poetry...